Chapter Eight: The Quick and Painful Death of Haaven
What took years to build took just months to destroy.
Iced by the press
On August 2, 2019, the LA Times published their second cover article about us and Haaven. It was jarring to read. Instead of telling the truth, how we had worked hard to finally be accepted into the tight-knit homeless services industry, the article painted us as ill-tempered, armed rebels challenging said system.
I was particularly offended by being described as “brusque.” That old-fashioned word means abrupt, blunt, or harsh in manner or speech. It felt like a very judgmental way to describe a woman who was simply speaking the truth about the worsening humanitarian crisis on the streets of Los Angeles.
I was shocked by Doug Smith’s (or perhaps his editor’s) version of our story. After all, I thought he was supportive of Haaven. He had told people he was. Apparently, creating controversy sold more papers.
The day that article came out marked the beginning of the end for Haaven. Within weeks, PATH began pulling their residents out. They literally moved people from their homes against their will. When we asked why, we were either ignored or given nonsensical excuses. Keep in mind, only weeks earlier, the PATH Board of Directors had been enthusiastic about opening their own PATH-branded shared homes using the Haaven model.
Within days, LAHSA decided it would no longer allow any public resources to be used to house people in Haaven homes - or any shared housing for that matter.
When asked why this was happening, they all shared the same three reasons:
Shared housing is “undignified,”
Asking residents to refrain from using drugs and alcohol in the homes was violating their civil rights, and
We did not offer a standard California Association of Realtors (CAR) lease.
Clearly someone had written a memo and suddenly every service provider was repeating these exact three reasons like a mantra. Organizations that had been supportive started declining meetings and apologizing while reciting the same list. It was like a Taylor Swift hit — everyone was singing the same tune.
We tried to counter with logic:
Shared housing creates community and a sense of belonging. Are college dorms “undignified”? What about army barracks or multi-generational family homes?
What about the rights of residents who are trying to maintain sobriety? You can’t smoke inside an office building or restaurant, but you can step outside.
How can you possibly rent one house to six separate people using a standard individual lease? It’s like trying to sell one car to six different buyers. We offered to create any legal contract that would give residents stability — but no one was interested in finding a solution.
We must have offended someone very powerful, either in the article or around that time.
Was it the County’s Department of Mental Health? For mentioning they were considering helping with social/emotional support?
Was it the United Way? (Elise Buik, President and CEO of United Way LA, had been perfectly pleasant when Ron Miller and I met with her the previous month.)
Was it LAHSA? (It wasn’t run by Va Lecia Adams-Kellum yet, so it couldn’t have been because my goal of ending homelessness saddened her.)
Perhaps we had angered the Housing First inner circle by daring to question Dr. Sam Tsemberis’ model?
Maybe it was the City Council? Rising stars like Mike Bonin and Nithya Raman were both committed DSA members.
Another possibility is that we threatened the tight-knit web of homeless housing developers. Afterall, our affordable and immediate solution was way cheaper their taxpayer-funded $800K per tiny apartment model.
Or perhaps it was simply that I was too “brusque.” Maybe this little lady should have refrained from speaking truth to power and kept her opinions about people dying on the streets to herself.
Whatever the reason, Haaven was subjected to death by a thousand cuts during the following months. Haaven residents were pulled from their homes, Andreas and I received no more referral calls on our commute home from school. And shared housing was cast as an “undignified” housing solution that impeded resident’s civil rights simply for offering a culture of recovery.
Make it make sense.
Click to view the video. It still amazes us that anyone could think this is “undignified.”
An olive branch
After the system stopped referring people to us, Rachel tried to find new residents to fill our empty beds. It was monumentally difficult. To get rental subsidies, homeless people had to work through the LAHSA system to be funneled into one of their well-funded service providers. Only then could they qualify for housing subsidies. The waiting lists were years long because beds were so scarce.
Without those subsidies, income-less people simply couldn’t pay rent. We knew this all too well. After Haaven was cut off from the system, we let many of our most vulnerable residents stay in their homes, either for free or at greatly reduced rent.
To this day, we still have an apartment rented to original Haaven residents. The Golden Girls continue to live together at Weller House, pooling their Social Security to cover their reduced rent. We no longer provide peer support, and a professional property manager now collects the rent. John has more than earned a break from the day-to-day management.
Rachel kept trying to rustle up appropriate residents, people who were homeless and truly ready to recover from life on the streets. But John and I couldn’t afford to run eight homes as a charity. We had mortgages to pay and were already hundreds of thousands of dollars in the red.
Slowly and painfully, we began combining homes and converting the empty ones back into traditional rentals. We had to spend a small fortune moving out all the furnishings and rehabbing the units. It was a devastatingly sad process. We had been so close to helping so many more people. Ron Miller’s expansion plan would have housed thousands at a fraction of what taxpayers were spending to house so few.
Many months later, Garcetti’s team, with whom we were still in contact, extended a proverbial olive branch. They offered us an option: redirect our model to house “fellows,” people being released from prison with nowhere to go. They justified that without housing, these fellows would likely become homeless.
We entertained the idea and even prepared budget options. But they wanted us to provide the shared housing at a drastically reduced rate. So low that John and I literally couldn’t cover our expenses. It turned out that housing budgets for people exiting prison were far less generous than those for the homeless. (Maybe the fellows should move to the streets for a while first so they could qualify for the better-funded programs.)
To their credit, Garcetti’s team believed that if we housed these fellows, they could champion our model and help us regain momentum with the system. Eric Garcetti himself seemed like a good guy who I truly believe wanted Haaven to succeed. His team was authentically trying to help us navigate the game they knew too well.
What they didn’t understand was that by then, John and I had already been running and personally funding Haaven for four years. We had helped 212 people transition off the streets.
We had been there for them at their lowest. Soothing people through late night mental breakdowns, celebrating hard-won sobriety milestones, breaking up fights, witnessing family reunifications, and listening as women recounted how many times they had been raped in encampments. We helped people survive the brutal ups and downs of bipolar disorder, channeled their obsessive-compulsive struggles, quietly steered them away from the liquor store on the corner, and accepted their gender identity when their own families wouldn’t.
Plus, we had already navigated through every layer of government - city, county, and state - only to be abandoned faster than rats on a sinking ship.
By this point, we were both exhausted.
John was furious at the injustice of it all. He had lost faith in the entire system and was repulsed by the hypocrisy. He concluded that despite all their protestations, speeches and photo ops, politicians had no interest in getting people off the streets. In fact, he believed homelessness actually worked in their favor and politicians wanted to sustain it. He didn’t want to donate another ounce of his energy to this dirty game.
I had no interest in shifting our focus away from homelessness. While noble, housing freshly released prisoners wasn’t my dream. I wanted more Golden Girls. More Michelles, Keishas, and Phils. I wanted to make a difference for people living and dying on the streets of Los Angeles.
Concurrently, the DSA was gaining traction in City Hall. Venice’s own DSA-aligned councilperson, Mike Bonin, was promoting his plan to forcibly buy out small apartment owners at cost to provide taxpayer-funded “social housing.” In other words, he was plotting to essentially commandeer privately-owned properties and turn them into “projects,” a la Chicago’s infamous Cabrini Green.
That threat was the final delusional nail hammered into the Haaven coffin.
COVID and the final payment
As we were consolidating homes in earnest, COVID hit. We were particularly concerned about our older residents, especially the Golden Girls. We armed each remaining Haaven home with boxes of masks, bottles of sanitizer, and yes, toilet paper.
While much of America was scheming to get an extra roll or two, we had abundant toilet paper. John had the hook-up. Smart & Final was still selling those big industrial rolls - the ones that go in high-traffic bathroom stalls at concert venues. Though they were a little unwieldy in traditional bathrooms, they were useful nonetheless.
Vaccinations were on the horizon and people in congregate living environments were prioritized. One of the Golden Girls, Sandra, was particularly fearful of the shot. She claimed she had heard the vaccine could make you infertile. I gently explained to Sandra that at 70 years old, it was far more likely she would succumb to COVID than to pregnancy.
Rachel and I promised them lunch at In-N-Out if they got vaccinated. The two Jackies and Sandra raced to get ready.
A few miles away at Casa John, most of the residents had either been pulled by the system or moved to another Haaven home as part of our consolidation. Only a few were left in the men’s house. Anthony Amos was one of them. He had been placed there by a provider right before we were iced by the system. Without any support, he quickly became a nightmare tenant, threatening other residents and causing general mayhem. He was clearly a danger to live with, so he ended up living alone in a five-bedroom, 3.5-bath house.
Anthony terrorized John just as he had terrorized his former housemates. He made threats and wild claims. He would rip cabinets off their hinges and then call the LA Department of Building and Safety to report us. LADBS inspectors would come out, write a citation, and then quietly apologize. They too knew it was a scam, but they had no choice.
One day, John went to Casa John to disconnect the cable TV. Anthony called the police. When they arrived, they told John that if he didn’t turn the cable back on, he would be arrested. Tenant rights and all.
Keep in mind: Anthony had no lease. He had never paid his $500 monthly rent. He had driven everyone else out of the property. Even the social service organizations wanted nothing more to do with him. He was our problem.
Anthony remained our problem for 18 long months. Eighteen months of paying the mortgage, utilities, constant repairs, and his cable TV bill, all while the City of LA made it virtually impossible for us to evict him.
When the courts finally reopened for eviction cases, we hired an attorney and got in line. It was a long wait. Our day in court came at last and I attended because I was afraid of what John might do if he came face-to-face with Anthony.
I had to sit across from Anthony as he tried to make small talk, complaining about how horrible homelessness was in LA and what a terrible job the government was doing. Not kidding.
Ultimately, I had to write a check to Anthony Amos for $5,000 and give him an additional 30 days to vacate Casa John, a property he was never supposed to be in from the beginning.
Finally, in Chapter Nine, I’ll share the last and saddest chapter of all: “The End of Haaven and Lessons Learned.”